Here is what should happen, but with Our Glorious Spineless President at the helm, I shall not hold my breath:

– The carrier strike groups in the area should be redeployed to the Red Sea and the eastern end of the Mediterranean. We have or soon will have three strike groups in the Persian Gulf (and boy does that article remind me how much I do not miss the Navy – back from one deployment in March, left on another at the end of last month) so the Red Sea is not hard, but I am not sure about current Med operations, and transiting the Sinai Canal is not recommended at the moment. Preferably these CSGs would be supplemented by at least one Expeditionary Strike Group for vertical lift capabilities and Marine detachments. Note that these CSGs and ESGs are for support purposes only, not invasion.

– All embassies/consulates in both countries should be shut down and all personnel and assets should be evacuated immediately (hence the ESGs in support roles). All associated buildings should be rigged to safely implode with minimal damage to the surrounding area 30 minutes after the last American leaves, with signs posted on the exterior indicating the demolition will take place in 60 minutes and a helpful 60-minute countdown broadcast over the buildings’ loudspeaker system.

– All American military / federal assets should be evacuated from both countries.

– All American citizens and their assets should be encouraged to leave the country and support should be provided as necessary.

– Both countries’ embassies/consulates here in the States should be shut down and their staff politely invited to leave the country… now.

– All foreign aid from the United States to both countries should be shut down immediately. That would save us about $1,500,000,000 a year for Egypt and somewhere around $100,000,000 a year for Libya. Call it a budget-balancing effort.

– If the perpetrators of Ambassador J. Christopher Stevens’ murder can be identified, that information should be provided to a willing SEAL Team, who are then given whatever budget and support they need.

And that is simply what I would consider to be the bare minimum; embargoes, seizure of all Egyptian- or Libyan-held assets in America, and so forth would be on the table as well.

It simply does not matter that these illegal and reprehensible actions were committed by an arguably-extremist faction in either/both countries; invading embassies – sovereign foreign soil – and killing ambassadors is simply Not Something Civilized People Do, and if they are not willing to be civilized, we simply have no business to conduct with them.

(Oh, and I would just love to know what the Rules of Engagement were for the Marines at the Egypt embassy; there was a time when no protester or rioter would have managed to capture an American flag. Look how far we have fallen.)

8 comments to saying what our glorious president will not

It’s also the job of the host country to provide embassy security outside the gates. Since they couldn’t or wouldn’t do that, even IF that mob was al Qaeda, the host country effectively sanctioned the attack.

We should consider ourselves at war with Libya, and start war proceedings against Egypt. But that won’t happen because this entire administration is about “taking it up the ass in the name of appeasement.”

In Libya, they didn’t just “fail” to provide outside security, they (at a minimum) deliberately stood aside. One of the staff killed in Libya was chatting online at the time, and it is reported that one of his last posts read:

(12:54:09 PM) vile_rat: assuming we don’t die tonight. We saw one of our ‘police’ that guard the compound taking pictures

Unless the Libyan government makes immediate and drastic reparations – including the heads of the assigned security team on pikes, alongside those of as many of the perpetrators as possible – we should be shooting at them right fricking now.

And I’m with Linoge: I want to know what the Rules of Engagement were for the Marines at the Egypt embassy – and why – because you know that they had to be practically begging to be allowed to shoot back. I also want to know who the stunted slime is who gave those orders, because he (or she *ahem*) deserves to be publicly outed, ridiculed, and excoriated (in both meanings of the word) for that idiotic cowardice.

While I do agree that all perpetrators should be crucified on crosses made of bacon, lemme play a very simple Devil’s advocate:

Could we actually afford such a war?

Sure, we could use that cash taken from all the foreign aid, but wouldn’t overall cost after the many years of war (don’t deny it won’t take forever- Afghanistan never really ‘ended’, O just said it did) shove the US further down the bankrupt hole? Then there’s the ‘rebuilding’, where we’d pretend to bring peace and unicorns to people who hate us for being there and resist until the day we evacuate.

Basically, I don’t think we could actually afford punishment to those who deserve it. Now, a good bombing run or twelve…

@ Erin Palette: Yeah, it is not exactly like the mobs / rioters in either country just spontaneously materialized out of nowhere and struck without warning. The host nations knew what was going on, and they did absolutely nothing to prevent or ameliorate it.

These actions may be by an extremist minority, but more than the people holding rocks were involved.

@ Jake: I had not heard that one of the murdered consulate members was online at the time… the more information that comes out about this charlie foxtrot, the more it becomes apparent that multiple people who should have done better failed miserably, both here in the States and amongst the Libyans.

As for the Marines, it would be one of the highest personal shames for them that an American flag was taken on their watch. I am honestly somewhat surprised that none of them took action of their own initiative, regardless of ROEs, but I can only imagine what the described punishments for such “violations” would be.

@ Tommy: So consulates are not embassies, and are often no bigger than just an office. This one was apparently larger, and apparently had actual threats levied against it, so, yes, not even so much as mounting a security force there is a gross failure by the Obama administration.

@ the dude: Who said anything about a war? I did not. I said we need to cut all ties – financial, formal, and political – with the offending nations, and, if possible, go out of our way to find and appropriately deal with a group of individuals who murdered an American ambassador. After that, screw them; let them freeze in the dark.

I know battleships are obsolete from a technical standpoint, but we really should have kept a couple in service (or build a couple of new ones) – they have a psychological impact far out of proportion to their cost/combat-effectiveness ratio. One battleship off the coast would be far more intimidating than two destroyers, and a couple of nine-gun “salutes” targeted on uninhabited areas just outside of a population center would be wonderfully… communicative of our displeasure.

Nothing says “We’re seriously pissed off” like a bunch of sixteen inch shells landing close enough to knock you off your feet.

@ Jake: The new SSGNs are meant to be the direct replacement for old-skool battleships – 140 Tomahawks plus a contingent of SEALs lurking off your coast. But, no, it has nowhere near the psychological impact of a plainly visible ship with literally feet of plate armor capable of raining down small VWs.

The manpower requirements on the old BBs was their biggest weakness, and their eventual downfall. We would have to revisit the design from the keel up, and no one wants to go back to 16″ guns for whatever reasons.

@ ChrisJ: Who wants to invade / occupy? I am advocating pulling out entirely and letting the barbarians do what barbarians do – kill each other.